Martha writes about politics and science. She has also written for the FT, the Times, and the Guardian, and has appeared on The Today programme, BBC News and Sky News. Previously, she was a staffer at the New Statesman where she wrote a weekly behavioural economics column. Her old posts are here

Boko Haram campaign shows Twitter's power – but is that power dangerous?

The Islamic militant group Boko Haram has been committing atrocities since 2009. They have travelled from village to village, killing and razing buildings to the ground. On February 25th this year, Boko Haram terrorists entered a boarding school and shot students as they slept, gunning them down if they tried to run. Some of the dorms they simply locked and set on fire. They have now killed more than 1,500 people.

But it took the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in mid-April for the West to take notice. Boko Haram is now the subject of international outrage. There is endless coverage on all major news networks – the Twitter campaign #bringbackourgirls has supporters from Michelle Obama to Cara Delevingne, and is now as viral as the Kony campaign went in 2012.

Come on, you know very well why. You even go on to list the reasons in your blogs: Islamic girls’ access to education is a hot topic for the West, feminist groups are a powerful force on the web, kidnapped girls have always got more attention than boys.

But…but.. why only focus on an atrocity when it chimes with hot topics? Isn’t this horribly unfair? Shouldn’t we be focused on all atrocities, all the time, everywhere?

The answer, of course, is that the news simply doesn’t work like this. It is is not a court of law – there are no grounds on which to insist one story “should” be chosen over another. Neither is it a government, responsible for doling out attention fairly. News outlets simply report what they think will grab the attention of their readers. And human attention is a fickle thing. Thousands of horrors “worthy” of international attention fly under the radar every day. And you can bet that once this issue has fallen out of fashion, or “been done”, it will be very hard to stir interest in it again, no matter what subsequent horrors occur. That the news (and Twitter) is amoral should surprise none.

But what is worrying is the power that these flash-in-the pan campaigns seems to have over governments and big international organisations. Don’t get me wrong – in this case the campaign has been an unqualified good. In response, it seems, to the media coverage and hashtag campaign, which sparked physical protests, the US and UK governments have committed to sending in legal and military intelligence to help the search for the girls, and Nigerian police are now offering a $300,000 reward for their return.

But let’s not forget that these governments were very aware of the Boko Haram situation before the campaigns started. And they, unlike Twitter users and news outlets, actually do have a responsibility to dispense their attention and resources fairly. As my colleague Tom Rogan pointed out a couple of days ago, their response to the February “dormitory inferno” was to “issue a vague press release”. Why didn’t they intervene back then, or earlier? With all their access to intelligence and expert advice, were they really waiting for the issue to drift into the eyelines of Twitter users before acting? Twitter campaigns are so easy to start, so easy to contribute to once they get going, so easy for the clueless to drive forward. Do we have that much uninformed power? It’s an uneasy feeling.